Commercial uniform rental laundering facilities handle numerous garments or articles of clothing and must be able to sort the garments once they have been washed and are ready to be delivered to the customer. Typically, commercial facilities are required to label and sort the garments by delivery route, customer and man. The majority of laundries sort the laundry by hand. Automatic sorting machines are available for sorting garments which reduce the amount of manpower required. Sorting machines used for this purpose usually consist of a conveyor upon which hanger-supported garments are transferred. The conveyor carries the garments to various sorting stations along the path of the conveyor. Each garment has a bar coded label which is detected or scanned by a detector. The code information is then conveyed to a computerized processor which controls automated means for sorting the garment. Automated means for removing the articles from the conveyor are provided at each station. Using a bar code scanner, an operator is required to manually scan the label for each garment into a computer. The code allows each article to be tracked by the computer as the article is moved along the conveyor so the computer can control the automated means for removing the articles when the article passes the appropriate sorting station. Codes have also been programmed into radio frequency electronic chips which are then sewn into the garments. This concept is workable, but the chips are more expensive than labels.
Due to the large volume of garments that are sorted, the task of reading and identifying the articles becomes quite repetitious and time-consuming. A human operator is often slower in scanning the labels with a bar code scanner than the optimum speed of the conveyor. What is needed is an automated reading and sorting system wherein a large number of articles can be automatically identified and separated.